Julia Wolfe, 'Anthracite Fields' Composer, Receives MacArthur Genius Grant

Revered composer Julia Wolfe (of Anthracite Fields fame) was recently named a "MacArthur Genius" when the venerable MacArthur Foundation announced their 2016 MacArthur Fellows list on Wednesday, September 21.

Each MacArthur recipient is awarded a "no-strings-attached $625,000 grant for their exceptional creativity and potential for future contributions to their fields," per a press release.

Wolfe told NPR that the honor is "still sinking in," the composer vague on how she'll utilize the unrestricted windfall that's paid out in equal installments over five years:

"It can allow for a little more time to breathe and think," she says. "It definitely opens up the possibility of dreaming of about things that I might not have dreamt about. It's a little vague right now, but it's all good."

The 57-year-old Wolfe is one of the most celebrated American composers of modern classical music. The aforementioned Anthracite Fields -- "an oratorio inspired by stories of Pennsylvania coal mining families that she culled from oral histories, interviews and speeches," per the linked NPR article -- won Ms. Wolfe the Pulitzer Prize in 2015.

As pictured above, Wolfe was also in attendance at the 58th Annual Grammy Awards back in February, where Anthracite Fields was nominated for the Best Contemporary Classical Composition Award. Fields eventually lost out to Stephen Paulus' Prayers & Remembrances.

Other 2016 winners of the MacArthur "Genius Grant" include lawyer Ahilan Arulanantham, linguist Daryl Baldwin, theater educator Anne Basting, sculptor Vincent Fecteau, playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, art historian Kellie Jones, computer scientist Subhash Khot, cultural historian Josh Kun, writer Maggie Nelson, microbiologist Dianne Newman, geobiologist Victoria Orphan, physical biologist and inventor Manu Prakash, financier José A. Quiñonez, poet Claudia Rankine, writer and creative Lauren Redniss, video artist Mary Reid Kelley, bioengineer Rebecca Richards-Kortum, jewelry artist Joyce J. Scott, journalist Sarah Stillman, computer scientist Bill Thies, graphic novelist Gene Luen Yang, and synthetic chemist Jin-Quan Yu.

Listen to the first movement of Wolfe's Anthracite Fields below.

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